Eyeless in Gaza, Page 37

  But in the succeeding days the temptation kept coming back. In spite of the spectacle of Mr Beavis’s self-destroying childishness, the quiet life seemed immensely attractive. ‘Mark’s mad,’ he kept assuring himself. ‘We’re doing something stupid and wrong. And after all, my sociology is important. It’ll help people to think clearly.’ Wasn’t it (ridiculous word!) a ‘duty’ to go on with it? But then, more than six weeks after his return to London, he saw Helen and Beppo Bowles – saw them both in the course of a single afternoon. The meeting with Helen was a chance one. It was in the French Room at the National Gallery. Anthony was stooping to look closely into Cezanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire, when he became aware that two other visitors had halted just behind them. He shifted a little to one side, so as to let them see the picture, and continued his meticulous examination of the brushwork.

  A few seconds passed; then, very slowly and with a foreign accent, a man’s voice said: ‘See now here how the nineteenth-century petit bourgeois tried to escape from industrialism. Why must he paint such landscapes, so romantic? Because he will forget the new methods of production. Because he will not think of the proletariat. That is why.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that is the reason,’ said another voice.

  With a start, Anthony recognized it as Helen’s. ‘What shall I do?’ he was wondering, when the voice spoke again.

  ‘Why, it’s Anthony!’ A hand touched his arm.

  He straightened himself up and turned towards her, making the gestures and noises appropriate to delighted astonishment. That face, which he had last seen alternately stony and bright with mockery, then in the rapt agony of pleasure, then dabbled with blood and pitiably disintegrated by a grief extreme beyond expression, finally hard as it had been at first, harder, more rigidly a stone – that face was now beautifully alive, and tender, illuminated from within by a kind of secure joy. She looked at him without the least trace of embarrassment. It was as though the past had been completely abolished, as though, for her, only the present existed and were real.

  ‘This is Ekki Giesebrecht,’ she said.

  The fair-haired young man beside her bent stiffly forwards as they shook hands.

  ‘He had to escape from Germany,’ she was explaining. ‘They would have killed him for his politics.’

  It was not jealousy that he felt as he looked from one glad face to the other – not jealousy, but an unhappiness so acute that it was like a physical pain. A pain that endured and that was not in the least diminished by the solemn absurdity of the little lecture which Helen now delivered on art as a manifestation of class interests. Listening, he could laugh to himself, he could reflect with amusement on love’s fantastic by-products in matters of taste, political opinions, religious beliefs. But behind the laughter, beneath the ironical reflections, that pain of unhappiness persisted.

  He refused her invitation to have tea with them.

  ‘I’ve promised to go and see Beppo,’ he explained.

  ‘Give him my love,’ she said, and went on to ask if, since his return, he had met Hugh.

  Anthony shook his head.

  ‘We’re parting company, you know.’

  Making an effort to smile, ‘All good wishes for the divorce,’ he said, and hurried away.

  Walking through the smoky dimness of the afternoon, he thought of that softly radiant face of hers, and felt, along with the pain of unhappiness, a renewal of that other, profounder pain of dissatisfaction with himself. Since his arrival in London he had led his ordinary London life – the lunches with men of learning and affairs, the dinners where women kept the conversation more gossipy and amusing – and the easy, meaningless successes, which his talents and a certain natural charm always allowed him to score at such gatherings, had made him all but completely forget his dissatisfaction, had masked the pain of it, as a drug will mask neuralgia or toothache. This meeting with Helen had instantaneously neutralized the soothing drug and left him defenceless against a pain no whit diminished by the temporary anodyne – rather, indeed, intensified by it. For the realization that he had permitted himself to be soothed by an opiate of such poor quality was a new cause for dissatisfaction added to the old. And then to think that he had been seriously considering the idea of returning to the old quiet life! So quietly squalid, so quietly inhuman and, for all the expense of thought it entailed, so quietly mad. Mark’s enterprise might be stupid and even disgraceful; but, however bad, it was still preferable to that quietude of work and occasional detached sensuality beside the Mediterranean.

  Standing at the door of Beppo’s flat, he heard the sound of voices – Beppo’s and another man’s. He rang the bell. Time passed. The door remained unopened. The voices talked on, inarticulately, but with shrill squeaks on Beppo’s side and, on that of the stranger, a crescendo of gruff barks which proclaimed that they were quarrelling. He rang again. There were a few more squeaks and shouts; then the sound of hurrying feet. The door was flung open, and there stood Beppo. The face was flushed, the bald crown shiny with perspiration. Behind him, very upright and soldierly in his carriage, appeared a rather coarsely handsome young man, with a small moustache and carefully oiled wavy brown hair, dressed in a blue serge suit of extreme and somehow improbable smartness.

  ‘Come in,’ said Beppo rather breathlessly.

  ‘Am I disturbing?’

  ‘No, no. My friend was just going – this is Mr Simpson, by the way – just going.’

  ‘Was he?’ asked the young man in a significant voice and with a Nottinghamshire accent. ‘I hadn’t known he was.’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better go,’ Anthony suggested.

  ‘No, please don’t, please don’t.’ There was a note in Beppo’s voice of almost desperate appeal.

  The young man laughed. ‘He wants protection – that’s what it is. Thinks he’s going to be blackmailed. And so I could if I wanted to.’ He looked at Anthony with knowing, insolent eyes. ‘But I don’t want to.’ He assumed an expression that was meant to be one of lofty moral indignation. ‘I wouldn’t do it for a thousand pounds. It’s a skunk’s game too.’ He pointed an accusing finger. ‘A mean, dirty swine. That’s what you are. I’ve said it before, and I say it again. And I don’t care who hears me. Because I can prove it. Yes, and you know I can. A mean, dirty swine.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Beppo cried, in the tone of one who makes unconditional surrender. Catching Anthony by the arm, ‘Go into the sitting-room, will you,’ he begged.

  Anthony did as he was told. Outside in the hall, a few almost whispered sentences were exchanged. Then, after a silence, the front door slammed, and Beppo, pale and distracted, entered the room. With one hand he was wiping his forehead; but it was only after he had sat down that he noticed what he was holding in the other. The fat white fingers were closed round his wallet. Embarrassed, he put the compromising object away in his breast pocket. Then, fizzling explosively in misery as he fizzled in mirth, ‘It’s only money that they’re after,’ he burst out like an opened ginger-beer bottle. ‘You’ve seen it. Why should I try to hide it? Only money.’ And he rambled on, popping, squeaking, fizzling in almost incoherent denunciation of ‘them,’ and commiseration for himself. Yes, he was doubly to be pitied – pitied for what he had to suffer because of ‘their’ mercenary attitude, when the thing he was looking for was love for love’s and adventure for adventure’s sake; pitied also for that growing incapacity to find the least satisfaction in any amorous experience that was not wholly new. Increasingly, repetition was becoming the enemy. Repetition killed what he called the frisson. Unspeakable tragedy. He, who so longed for tenderness, for understanding, for companionship, was debarred from ever getting what he wanted. To have an affair with somebody of one’s own class, somebody one could talk to, had come to be out of the question. But how could there be real tenderness without the sensual relationship? With ‘them,’ the relationship was possible, was wildly desirable. But tenderness could no more flourish without communication than it could flourish without sensu
ality. And sensuality entirely divorced from communication and tenderness seemed now to be possible only under the stimulus of a constant change of object. There had to be another of ‘them’ each time. For that he was to be pitied; but the situation had its romantic side. Or at any rate might have it – used to have it. Nowadays, Beppo complained, ‘they’ had changed, were becoming mercenary, frankly rapacious, mere prostitutes.

  ‘You saw just now,’ he said, ‘the sordidness of it, the lowness!’ His misery bubbled over as though under an inner pressure of carbonic acid gas. In his agitation he heaved himself out of his chair and began to walk up and down the room, exposing to Anthony’s eyes, now the bulging waistcoat, the lavish tie from Sulka’s, the face with its pendant of chins, the bald and shining crown, now the broad seat of pale check trousers, the black jacket rising pear-like to narrow shoulders, and below the central baldness that fuzz of pale brown hair, like a Florentine page’s, above the collar. ‘And I’m not mean. God knows, I’ve got plenty of other faults, but not that. Why can’t they understand that it isn’t meanness, that it’s a wish to . . . to . . .’ he hesitated, ‘well, to keep the thing on a human basis? A basis at least of romance, of adventure. Instead of that, they make these awful, humiliating scenes. Refusing to understand, absolutely refusing.’

  He continued to walk up and down the room in silence. Anthony made no comment, but wondered inwardly how far poor old Beppo knew the truth or whether he too refused to understand – refused to understand that, to ‘them,’ his ageing and unpalatable person could hardly be expected to seem romantic, that the only charm which remained to him, outside a certain good taste, and a facile intelligence which ‘they’ were not in a position to appreciate, was his money. Did he know all this? Yes, of course he did; it was unavoidable. He knew it quite well and refused to understand. ‘Like me,’ Anthony said to himself.

  That evening he telephoned to Mark to tell him definitely that he could book their passages.

  CHAPTER XXXVIII

  August 10th 1934

  TODAY HELEN TALKED again with Miller. Talked with a kind of resentful vehemence. (Certain memories, certain trains of thought are like the aching tooth one must always be touching just to make sure it still hurts.) Non-violence: this time, it was not only a mere trick, insignificant; it was also wrong. If you’re convinced people are wicked, you’ve no right not to try to make them behave decently. Agreed: but how are you most likely to succeed? By violence? But violence may make people assume the forms of good behaviour for the moment; it won’t produce the reality of genuine and permanent good behaviour. She accused me of shirking real issues, taking refuge in vague idealism. It all boiled down at last to her vengeful hatred for the Nazis. Peace all round, except for Nazis and, by contagion, Fascists. These should be punished, painfully exterminated – like rats. (Note that we’re all ninety-nine per cent. pacifists. Sermon on Mount, provided we’re allowed to play Tamburlane or Napoleon in our particular one per cent. of selected cases. Peace, perfect peace, so long as we can have the war that suits us. Result: everyone is the predestined victim of somebody else’s exceptionally permissible war. Ninety-nine per cent. pacifism is merely another name for militarism. If there’s to be peace, there must be hundred per cent. pacifism.)

  We exchanged a lot of arguments; then, for some time, said nothing. Finally, she began to talk about Giesebrecht. Executed after God only knew what tortures, ‘Can you be surprised if I feel like this about the Nazis?’ Not surprised at all – any more than by the Nazis themselves. Surprising would have been tolerance on their part, forgiveness on hers. ‘But the person who might have forgiven vanished when Ekki vanished. I was good while he was with me. Now I’m bad. If he were still here I might be able to forgive them for taking him away. But that’s an impossible condition. I can’t ever forgive.’ (There were answers to that, of course. But it didn’t seem to me that I had any right, being what I am, acting as I still do, to make them.) She went on to describe what he had been to her. Someone she didn’t have to be ashamed of loving, as she had had to be ashamed of loving Gerry. Someone she had been able to love with her whole being – ‘not just occasionally and with part of me, on a roof; or just for fun, in a studio, before dinner.’ And she came back to the same point – that Ekki had made her kind, truthful, unselfish, as well as happy. ‘I was somebody else while I was with him. Or perhaps I was myself – for the first time.’ Then, ‘Do you remember how you laughed at me that time on the roof, when I talked about my real self?’ Did I not remember! I hadn’t even been real enough, at that moment, to perceive my own remoteness from reality. Afterwards, when I saw her crying, when I knew that I’d been deliberately refusing to love her, I did perceive it.

  After a silence, ‘At the beginning I believe I could have loved you almost as much as I loved Ekki.’

  And I’d done my best, of course, to prevent her.

  Her face brightened with sudden malicious derision. Like her mother’s. ‘Extraordinary how funny a tragedy is, when you look at it from the wrong side!’ Then, still smiling, ‘Do you imagine you care for me now? Lo-ove me, in a word?’

  Not only imagined; did really.

  She held up a hand, like a policeman. ‘No film stuff here. I’d have to throw you out if you began that game. Which I don’t want to do. Because, oddly enough, I really like you. In spite of everything. I never thought I should. Not after that dog. But I do.’ That painful brightness came back into the face. ‘All the things I thought I should never do again! Such as eating a square meal; but I was doing it after three days. And wanting to make love. That seemed inconceivably sacrilegious. And yet within three or four months it was occurring to me, I was having dreams about it. And one of these days, I suppose, I shall actually be doing it. Doing it “without any obligation,” as they say when they send you the vacuum-cleaner on approval. Exactly as I did before.’ She laughed again. ‘Most probably with you, Anthony. Till the next dog comes down. Would you be ready to begin again?’

  Not on the old basis. I’d want to give more, receive more.

  ‘It takes two to give and receive.’ Then she switched the conversation on to another line; who was I having an affair with at the moment? and when I answered: with nobody, asked whether it wasn’t difficult and disagreeable to be continent, and why I should want to imitate Mark Staithes. Tried to explain that I wasn’t imitating Mark, that Mark’s asceticism was undertaken for its own sake and above all for his, that he might feel himself more separate, more intensely himself, in a better position to look down on other people. Whereas what I was trying to do was to avoid occasions for emphasizing individual separateness through sensuality. Hate, anger, ambition explicitly deny human unity; lust and greed do the same indirectly and by implication – by insisting exclusively on particular individual experiences and, in the case of lust, using other people merely as a means for obtaining such experiences. Less dangerously so than malevolence and the passions for superiority, prestige, social position, lust is still incompatible with pacifism; can be made compatible only when it ceases to be an end in itself and becomes a means towards the unification through love of two separate individuals. Such particular union, a paradigm of union in general.

  CHAPTER XXXIX

  March 25th 1928

  WHEN HELEN KEPT her eyes closed, the red darkness behind the lids came wildly and chaotically to life. Like a railway station, it seemed, full of hurrying people, loud with voices; and the colours glowed, the forms stood sharply out, jewelled, with the more than real definition of forms and colours under limelight. It was as though the fever had assembled a crowd inside her head, had lighted lamps and turned on the gramophone. On the unnaturally brilliant stage the images came and went on their own initiative and in ferocious disregard of Helen’s own wishes. Came and went, talked, gesticulated, acted out their elaborate, insane dramas, unceasingly, without mercy on her fatigue, without consideration for her longing to be at rest and alone. Sometimes, in the hope that the outer world would eclipse this scu
rrying lunacy within, she opened her eyes. But the light hurt her; and in spite of those bunched roses on the wallpaper, in spite of the white counterpane and the knobs at the end of the bedstead, in spite of the looking-glass, the hair brushes, the bottle of eau-de-Cologne, those images on the other side of her eyes went on living that private life of theirs, undisturbed. A vehement and crazy life – now utterly irrelevant, like a story invented by somebody else, then all at once agonizingly to the point, agonizingly hers.

  This morning, for example, this afternoon (which was it? time was at once endless and non-existent: but at any rate it was just after Mme Bonifay had been in to see her – stinking, stinking of garlic and dirty linen), there had been a huge hall, with statues. Gilded statues. She recognized Voltaire, fifty feet high, and there was one of those Chinese camels, but enormous. People were standing in groups, beautifully placed, like people on the stage. Indeed, they were on the stage. Acting a play of intrigue, a play with love-scenes and revolvers. How bright the spotlights were! how clearly and emphatically they spoke the lines! Each word a bell, each figure a shining lamp.

  ‘Hands up . . . I love you . . . If she falls into the traps . . .’ And yet who were they, what were they saying? And now for some extraordinary reason they were talking about arithmetic. Sixty-six yards of linoleum at three and eleven a yard. And the woman with the revolver was suddenly Miss Cosmas. There was no Voltaire, no gilded camel. Only the blackboard. Miss Cosmas had always hated her because she was so bad at maths, had always been odious and unfair. ‘At three and eleven,’ Miss Cosmas shouted, ‘at three and eleven.’ But Mme Bonifay’s number was eleven, and Helen was walking once again along the rue de la Tombe-Issoire, feeling more and more sick with apprehension at every step. Walking slowlier and slowlier in the hope of never getting there. But the houses came rushing down towards her, like the walls of the moving staircases in the Underground. Came rushing towards her, and then, when number eleven drew level, stopped dead, noiselessly. ‘Mme Bonifay. Sage Femme de Ière Classe.’ She stood looking at the words, just as she had stood in reality, two days before; then walked on, just as she had walked on then. Only one more minute, she pleaded with herself, till she got over her nervousness, till she felt less sick. Walked up the street again, and was in a garden with her grandmother and Hugh Ledwidge. It was a walled garden with a pine wood at one end of it. And a man came running out of the wood, a man with some awful kind of skin disease on his face. Red blotches and scabs and scurf. Horrible! But all her grandmother said was, ‘God has spat in his face,’ and everyone laughed. But in the middle of the wood, when she went on, stood a bed, and immediately, somehow, she was lying on it, looking at a lot of people in another play, in the same play, perhaps. Bright under the spotlights, with voices like bells in her ears; but incomprehensible, unrecognizable. And Gerry was there, sitting on the edge of her bed, kissing her, stroking her shoulders, her breasts. ‘But, Gerry, you mustn’t! All those people – they can see us. Gerry, don’t!’ But when she tried to push him away, he was like a block of granite, immovable; and all the time his hands, his lips were releasing soft moths of quick and fluttering pleasure under her skin; and the shame, the dismay at being seen by all those people, let loose at the same time a special physical anguish of its own – a finger-footed, wildlier-fluttering sensation that was no longer a moth, but some huge beetle, revolting to the touch, and yet revoltingly delicious. ‘Don’t, Gerry, don’t!’ And suddenly she remembered everything – that night after the kitten had died, and all the other nights, and then the first signs, the growing anxiety, and the day she had telephoned to him and been told that he’d gone to Canada, and finally the money, and that evening when her mother . . . ‘I hate you!’ she cried; but as she managed with a last violent effort to push him away, she felt a stab of pain so excruciating that for a moment she forgot her delirium and was wholly at the mercy of immediate, physical reality. Slowly the pain died down; the other-world of fever closed in on her again. And it wasn’t Gerry any more, it was Mme Bonifay. Mme Bonifay with that thing in her hand. Je vous ferai un peu mal. And it wasn’t the bed or the pine wood but the couch in Mme Bonifay’s sitting-room. She clenched her teeth, just as she had clenched them then. Only this time it was worse, because she knew what was going to happen. And under the limelight the people were still there, acting their play. And lying there on the couch she herself was part of the play, outside, and at last was no longer herself, but someone else, someone in a bathing-dress, with enormous breasts, like Lady Knipe’s. And what was there to prevent her breasts from getting to be like that? Bell-clear, but incomprehensible, the actors discussed the nightmarish possibility. The possibility of Helen with enormous breasts, of Helen with thick rolls of fat round her hips, of Helen with creases in her thighs, of Helen with rows and rows of children – howling all the time; and that disgusting smell of curdled milk; and their diapers. And here, all of a sudden, was Joyce wheeling the pram along the streets of Aldershot. Taking the baby out. Feeding him. Half horrified, half fascinated, she watched him clinging, sucking. Flattened against the breast, the little frog face wore an expression of determined greed that gradually relaxed, as the stomach filled, to one of sleepy, imbecile ecstasy. But the hands – those were fully human, those were little miracles of the most delicate elegance. Lovely, exquisite little hands! Irresistible little hands! She took the baby from Joyce, she pressed him close against her body, she bent her head so as to be able to kiss those adorable little fingers. But the thing she held in her arms was the dying kitten, was those kidneys at the butcher’s, was that horrible thing which she had opened her eyes to see Mme Bonifay nonchalantly picking up and carrying away in a tin basin to the kitchen.